<p>How many of y'all applied to / got accepted to both Pomona & CMC? I noticed a lot of overlap in the two boards, and I kind of wanted to get some opinions. I seriously did not think I'd be able to get into both, so now that the choice is there, I'm really torn.</p>
<p>Which do you prefer? What do you think are their main differences?</p>
<p>I got into both. And I can’t decide :</p>
<p>The thing is, I want to study both business and biology. CMC has a major called science and management (which suits my interests perfectly), but my real passion is biology, which is stronger at Pomona. Another thing is that CMC is more practical and career-oriented, which I really like. There are many opportunities for internships and stuff. But Pomona is more well known (I think?) and more prestigious. So I am really confused as to which school I want to go to. I’m going to visit both and see how I feel.</p>
<p>I also didn’t get any financial aid from Pomona (and probably none from CMC). Money is going to be an issue for my family. Since I’m upper middle class, I’m pretty much screwed anywhere. My parents don’t know if spending so much money on Pomona or CMC is worth it. They’ll only pay so much for Harvard, Princeton, or a joint degree program at Penn. So sadly, I may end up at USC on scholarship or UCLA/Cal.</p>
<p>ahhh you have a lot of the same thoughts I’ve been having!</p>
<p>I love CMC’s emphasis on internships, and even though I’m totally undecided about what career to pursue, economics and government were both areas where I had the most interest.</p>
<p>However, like you said, Pomona is more selective and I think it is probably more well-rounded which is good for me because I’m probably going to change majors multiple times.</p>
<p>I’m planning to visit in april, I guess I would make my final decision based on personality of student body, since I’ve heard they’re pretty distinct. </p>
<p>But my financial situation is kind of. hah identical. EFC too high for aid but only barely so… my parents are willing to pay the full ticket to a name brand school only 
I have been in love with these claremont colleges for so long that I figure a visit would either solidify that love or help me let go to a more practical option. Right now, it’s looking like Rice or Plan-II & BHP at UT… which I also can’t decide over hah</p>
<p>Waitlisted at Pomona and accepted to CMC. </p>
<p>I absolutely love the atmosphere at Pomona tho… dunno if CMC is the right fit for me 
</p>
<p>Though CMC is probably the better fit in terms of academics, as I’m highly interested in politics/gov pusuing a law degree. I’m also considering appealing Pomona’s waitlist though … i just really fell in love :(</p>
<p>I did receive a full scholarship + tons of benefits from UCLA, got accepted to Cal, so my parents are really pushing for UCLA right now. But i just don’t know if i could handle such a large school…</p>
<p>I think I’m leaning toward Pomona at the moment. Although I love CMC’s emphasis on leadership and work experience, I think Pomona suits me better because I don’t really know exactly what I want to do. Pomona could give me a more well-rounded education. After all, I could just pursue an MBA at a top business school if I discover that I really want to do business. Pomona’s life sciences are stronger too. Ah this is so hard!</p>
<p>(Skyhawkk’s Roommate)</p>
<p>Ok I want to first address the life sciences and the well-roundedness of CMC vs. Pomona. </p>
<p>I was accepted to both CMC and Pomona and decided to attend CMC. I am a psychology-biology dual major (pre-med) with a sequence in gender studies. I hope to pursue a MD/PhD program in psychology or healthcare policy. CMC’s Joint Science Department is grossly underrated and I actually think its program overall is superior to Pomona’s (though both are very strong). Pomona does offer some interesting upper level electives but you can take those as a CMC student. You have to remember that we are a consortium and you can take classes anywhere. The most important thing to do is go to the school with the best personality fit. </p>
<p>I decided to go to CMC because I think it has a superior pre-med program that is more laid back and personal. Pomona’s pre-med program is more of a weed out program (the first intro courses are unreasonably tough) because they don’t have enough resources for all their potential premed students (about 50% of Pomona freshmen are potential pre-med) whereas CMC assumes that if you are smart enough to get into CMC you will make a good doctor and we will make resources available to you if you decide to be pre-med.</p>
<p>Also I like the social life at CMC. We are a self-policing campus whereas Pomona has a very strict drinking policy with RAs that are out to get you. (And in my opinion they have a classist system of fines.) We are ambitious but not competitive. We want each other to succeed because through mutual success we all become better - AND that is the best kind of environment for a college. Also our alums are very active and proud. I have stayed close with the alum that interviewed me last year for admissions and he helped get me an awesome policy internship this summer with a reputable advocacy group. (Oh yeah, we also offer grants for internships - I am getting $5,000 this summer). </p>
<p>It is true our gov and econ departments are incredible, but don’t let that overshadow the rest of our departments which are also great. Furthermore, our departments work well together to allow for interdisciplinary study and dual majors. I wanted to get a social science perspective on psychology and hard science perspective on neuroscience and I will be able to do that with my Psych-Bio dual. Furthermore, I will have enough time left over to take some of our famous gov courses and pursue a gender studies sequence. </p>
<p>Both schools are great. My best recommendation is to spend the night at both campuses and decide which personality fits your own. CMC has a specific extroverted, ambitious nature about it. Pomona is an eclectic collection of really intelligent and accomplished students. Don’t go to Pomona because you think it is better for life sciences or more prestigious. Those are both common mistakes that many potential students make. I know because I’ve been there and I haven’t regretted my decision. (One of my friends actually got into both schools and ended up going to Pomona because of his assumption is had more prestige and he has seemed to regret it.)</p>
<p>I graduated from CMC way back in '94 – I know, I know I’m old…</p>
<p>I was a biology-math dual major who entered CMC thinking I was premed. I ended up graduating with Joint Science Department Honors (one of only 3 in my class) and was a top student, but ended up not pursuing a career in medicine/science. I can’t say enough good things about Joint Science…I also took a ton of classes at Pomona and at HMC and I can say the classes I took at Joint Science were just as good if not better. I got to do amazing internships – one year with a community service grant (basically a CMC foundation paid me to work with a non-profit) and two years at Lawrence Livermore National Lab working on the Human Genome Project (at the height of the project). I also did research with professors and was a TA and tutor for Intro Bio, OChem, and some other classes. I think my science education was exceptional.</p>
<p>Having all that experience, what did I do after graduation – I went into consulting (had numerous offers from all of the big firms). I had figured out science and medicine weren’t for me and b/c of CMCs amazing career office and the amazing reputation, I got to go into consulting – something I probably wouldn’t have even heard of at Cal or the Joing BS/MD program with UCR/UCLA which were my other strongest contenders. For me, CMC was a great fit…I was able to participate in athletics, have a small campus experience and get an amazing science education. At the end of the day, the fact that I had picked a great school where I “fit” personally really helped me find a career that was rewarding and fun when I realized what I wanted as a 17 year old college freshman wasn’t what I wanted as a young adult. </p>
<p>I ended up spending three years with a top consulting firm and then got into Kellogg for business school. I think it’s interesting in my class at business school there were 8 students from CMC (about the same number as Stanford, Harvard, and Northwestern itself). I’ve had an amazing career in business and I owe so much of that to CMC.</p>
<p>Ultimately, you need to figure out where you fit best, but as an Alum who has been there/done that, just wanted to echo some of the other posters who said that you shouldn’t discount the quality of the science education at CMC.</p>
<p>Thanks for the great posts. Another question… my main concern is CMC’s reputation of being an unofficial “fraternity” – as someone who does not drink, how much of CMC social life revolves around partying?</p>
<p>Yeah, thanks for the great input. Can you elaborate more on the dual majors? For instance since I’m interested in the science and management major, what are the classes like? Do you basically take econ and science classes separately? Or are there actually classes deal with the business side of science? (Like in Penn’s LSM program)</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Darling - I don’t like the connotation of “fraternity” because of obvious stereotypes, but at the same time, I think it does resemble CMC in some fashion. After I decided to come to CMC, I read an essay by Prof. Pitney. who compared Claremont McKenna to the bar in Cheers. I couldn’t agree with him more:</p>
<p>"Why is this college different from every other college?</p>
<p>I could answer that question with other questions.</p>
<p>Where else would alumni get sentimental – truly misty-eyed sentimental – about econ-accounting courses?</p>
<pre><code> Where else could you turn on cable news and see your students talk about Internet fantasy teams made up of members of Congress?
And where else would so many people sport T-shirts proclaiming that the registrar is their homegirl?
I could keep asking rhetorical questions, but instead I recently posed real questions to students and alumni. Here’s what they said.
CMC is different because:
It has a distinct mission;
It welcomes diverse opinions and lively debates; and
It’s a lot like the bar in Cheers.
That last point doesn’t have anything to do with adult beverages -- even though Doug Johnson says he remembers Ken Kesey drinking from a flask of peppermint schnapps while giving his speech at the 1992 Senior Class dinner.
It’s like the Cheers bar in other ways, and we’ll come back to that in a few minutes.
But first, let’s think about the mission.
Claremont McKenna College is about leadership and public affairs. This focus pervades everything we do. Alex Lamy says: “[CMC] allows a wide variety of students to participate in student governance--and to cause controversy with little effort. I think it epitomizes the approach of allowing anyone interested to get hands-on experience as part of a CMC education, even if the events/activities/controversies are not as important in hindsight that they were at the time.”
Liz Huttner remembers one night in the congressional simulation: “My committee was working late and we decided to get fast food. I don't remember where we went, but I do remember that we handled orders using parliamentary procedure. `I move to order an extra large fries with so-and-so.’ `I second.’ This didn't seem particularly weird at the time.”
Alex Piazza offers another example:
</code></pre>
<p>“I work in the Ath kitchen, and after the reservations filled up in a record three minutes for Justice Scalia, I offered to do dishes so that I could watch him speak. CMC is probably one of the only places:</p>
<pre><code> (1) that has a venue like the Athenaeum
(2) uses that venue to bring in the likes of Justice Scalia
(3) has a student body that will reserve the room to capacity in less than three minutes, and, finally,
(4) provides students with an opportunity to do dishes to see a Supreme Court Justice.”
CMCers excel in writing and research, and they put their academic work into action. A few years ago, Sarah Awad wrote her senior thesis in math on A Statistical Analysis of Combined Deterministic and Random Changes. She then presented it to the United States Navy Strategic Systems Program.
In the classroom, we look outward as well as inward. We learn what Robert Frost’s poetry says about evolution, and how religion has shaped the American presidency. Stacy Beck says: “When I see the ads for `Save Darfur,’ I’m taken back to the transformative experience of taking John Roth’s Holocaust class and so grateful that he has institutionalized the study of genocide at CMC so that it will remain after his retirement.”
CMC alums, as we all know, go on to become leaders in business, government, and the professions. Sometimes they lead where it’s dangerous. Some have served in Iraq, and at least two of them – Matt Pedersen and Kincy Clark – kept blogs about their experiences there. They showed humor and compassion and the grace under pressure that Hemingway described as the very definition of courage.
CMCers start changing the world before they graduate. Mike Peel tells me about SOURCE, a student-run group that consults for nonprofits. With help from Kevin Arnold and the Kravis Institute, students thought it up and got it running. Mike quotes the head of one local nonprofit as saying that CMCers “allowed our children’s mentoring program to double in size. SOURCE has been the single most effective organization with which [our group] has collaborated.”
We’re big on organization here in Claremont. A guru of organization studies was the late great Peter Drucker. He said: “The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision without disagreement.”
There’s plenty of disagreement here at CMC – it’s intentional and it’s good. Throughout his long presidency, Jack Stark worked hard to make sure that there were a variety of viewpoints on campus. Here’s what I tell prospective students: During your time at CMC, you’ll have some classes with liberal professors and some classes with conservative professors. And after four years, you’ll walk out thinking for yourself.
Jana Hardy says:
“CMC is different because we learn to engage those with whom we disagree. Having lived in New York for almost three years, I now realize that it is a rare talent. I like to tell people that when I participated in the Washington Program, I shared a two bedroom apartment with four other girls … Two of us worked at the Heritage Foundation and the others worked at Population Action International, the Sierra Club and People for the American Way. It was the fall of 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq war, and we had lots of energetic, often heated discussions. Unless the discussion was about whose turn it was to buy the toilet paper, we always walked away friends.”
Two such friends were Clark Lee of the College Democrats and Rob Carpenter of the College Republicans. At a moment of crisis for the college, they helped organize our public response. Or as they put it, “Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences and successfully worked together against a fake hate crime.” Later on, during meetings to discuss their senior theses, we’d have to take time out when reporters called – for them, not me.
CMC isn’t just a college – it’s a community. President Gann knows a lot of students by name, and can tell you all about their backgrounds. Freshmen actually get to spend a lot of quality time with her – especially if they can keep up with her during a 5-kilometer run.
That closeness is a longstanding tradition here at CMC. Doug Johnson recalls his favorite Claremont memory: “Jack Stark doing his regular shifts at Collins and with the Physical Plant staff. Nothing captured the school’s focus on the student experience like having the President come in wearing Physical Plant blues and clean a student's room!”
Jil Stark is part of that tradition, too. Christiana Dominguez tells this story:
“I went down to the Pomona soccer field to watch a Stag v hen face off. True to form, Jil Stark was there, faithfully cheering on her beloved CMS Stag Soccer team, umbrella in hand to keep her shaded. There was either a bad call or a taunt from the sagehen side of the field and Mrs. Stark did NOT take kindly to her boys being messed with … [S]ome young, male, sagehen fans tried to engage and exchange some unfriendly words with Mrs. Stark. I thought she was going to throw down. She held her own just fine and shocked the holy hell out of the sagehen fans.”
Students get to know administrators, too. Here’s what Jake Zimmerman says:
“The day before graduation, I was at a reception attended by Admissions office staffers, and I started chatting with a (now-departed) Associate Dean of Admission. She told me, with some amusement, about her impression of me at the McKenna Achievement Awards weekend more than four years earlier. She said: `I remember that we were all a little worried about you when you first came here. We didn't know if you were going to succeed in this environment, and it's been a great pleasure to see you put our fears to rest in the last four years.’
"Think about that. Admissions officers read countless applications every day for months at a time. Every year, they confront a whole new class of high school seniors, and every year the process must be exhausting. Yet she somehow remembered not just my name -- she had followed my career at CMC, remembering my questionable behavior in 1992, and actually taking pleasure in knowing that the Admissions office had made the right call, after all!"
Indeed. Jake was a Truman Scholar, went to Harvard Law School, and last year won election to the Missouri State Legislature.
Stacy Beck went to Yale Law School, and she thinks CMC’s intimate setting provided her with a good start. “I actually knew my professors -- were invited into their homes, broke bread with them at the Ath -- and they knew me. When I needed recommendations for law school five years after graduation, I didn’t have to approach near-strangers, hoping they’d recall me from the back of the lecture hall. They remembered me -- my work, my personality, my writing. And still do!”
Jonathan Medina sums it up: “Professors' passion for their subject and teaching is self-evident and rubs off on the students in a very real way, so real that CMC people become `family.’ Not only what goes on in the classroom, but having dinner at professors’ houses, going with them on hikes on Mt. Baldy - they all add to the sense of belonging and the sense that CMC really is set apart.”
A sense of belonging, community, and friendship – these things really do set CMC apart. Two years ago, my family and I got a vivid reminder of the CMC difference when a mudslide destroyed our house. We’re fine now, but it was a tough time then. And during that time, Joe Bessette organized an effort to see us through. And we got help from students, faculty, alumni, and trustees. So when I look out at this audience, I see friends to whom I am forever grateful. I see people who still care and come up and ask me how everything is going.
So that’s the real reason why CMC is a lot like the bar in Cheers. It’s a place where everybody knows your name."
</code></pre>
<p>I think this addresses the aura of CMC and illustrates how much more there is to CMC than the drinking stereotype. There are plenty of sub-free events such as Hub Quiz, a trivia game played in teams of four where the winning team gets $200 to split amongst themselves. There are plenty of movie showings and subsidies to see shows in LA. I have many friends in Stark who don’t drink and love CMC just as much as I do.</p>
<p>By the way, this essay has brought some of my friends to tears because Pitney is such a great professor, and CMC is that much of a special place.</p>
<p>huliaj, i sent you a PM!</p>
<p>jugglyhead, i didnt receive it :(</p>
<p>oh it should be there now… LOL made the post before i wrote the message… silly me</p>
<p>oh i just got it. thanks so much!</p>
<p>“However, like you said, Pomona is more selective”</p>
<p>Not so fast! According to this article in TSL: [Admission</a> Rates for 2013 Remain Steady, Despite Recession](<a href=“The Student Life - Claremont Colleges News”>The Student Life - Claremont Colleges News), Pomona had a 15.7% admission rate (which I would assume is how one would go about measuring selectivity) for the class of 2013. It also says CMC accepted 671 out of 4,275. Calcuate it and you get 15.696%. Believe you me, we will hold that over Pomona’s head for the next year :)</p>
<p>funny how the Pomona article reported Pomona’s admit rate to 3 digits, but rounded (up) CMC’s to two digits.</p>
<p>if you believe CMC’s numbers on their admissions web site ( <a href=“http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/admission/fr-class-profile.php[/url]”>http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/admission/fr-class-profile.php</a> ), the 3 extra apps (4278) gets the admit rate to 15.68!..lots more breathing room.</p>
<p>of course, if either takes one or two off their waitlists, the lead could change.</p>
<p>guess CMC started this little ‘news’ skirmish with this 3/31 article that touted CMC’s (slight) increase in apps compared to Pomona’s (slight) drop:
[CMC</a> Defies Liberal Arts Trend with Steady Applicant Numbers|The Forum](<a href=“http://cmcforum.com/news/03312009-cmc-defies-liberal-arts-trend-with-steady-applicant-numbers]CMC”>http://cmcforum.com/news/03312009-cmc-defies-liberal-arts-trend-with-steady-applicant-numbers)</p>
<p>from the article
</p>
<p>Gotta say I read a lot of threads on a lot of colleges, but you CMC folks really consistently do a great job on articulately portraying the benefits of your school. I am very impressed. There very little defensiveness/inferiority complex despite the constant comparing of the other consortium members. Your enthusiasm for your school isn’t of the rah-rah kind seen elsewhere, nor do I see you slamming other schools.</p>
<p>963 admitted
6149 applied to Pomona</p>
<p>963/6149=15.6610831% ~ 15.7% ~ 16%</p>
<p>It’s amazing how close the schools can be. The TSL should have rounded both, or neither.</p>
<p>Choose between Pomona and CMC based on your visiting experience. There’s a real difference in the personality/culture of the schools and the bottom line is, if you were able to get into EITHER of these schools, you’re a smart cookie who’ll do well in life. </p>
<p>In the end, Pomona tends to be more “bookish” and CMC has a lot of finance focused people. While CMC’s got a great pre-med program, the previous entries make it sound like a lot of people do it. The overwhelming majority of CMC students go for government and finance jobs right away.</p>
<p>I know various friends who got accepted to both and their individual personalities really made the difference.</p>